"Don"t forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!"
"Indeed I shaan"t. What"s the name of the alley, and which bell?" The New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
"Had n"t you better let me write it for you, dear?" said the Boston girl. "It is as well to have it legible, you know."
"Take it," said the New York girl. "There "s tew York shill"ns in it when I hand it to you."
"Your whole quarter"s allowance, I bullieve,--ain"t it?" said the Boston girl.
"Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be strictly attended to in this inst.i.tution. The most correct standards of p.r.o.nunciation will be inculcated by precept and example. It will be the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."--Extract from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste"s Boarding-school.
Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls. Striking, they all agreed, but then the criticisms began. Many of the girls chattered a little broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social operators what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon. Her face she allowed was handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly comme il faut. More specifically, she was guilty of contours fortement p.r.o.nonces,--corsage de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage, etc., etc. This girl prided herself on her figure.
Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of Myrtle"s face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy girl"s.
The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live freshman. She was n.o.body by her connections, it is true, so far as they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two would make her a belle of the first water. She had that air of indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community. On the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the great city markets.
She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists. She learned, therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors. Her somewhat rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist"s touch. Her voice, which had only been taught to warble the simplest melodies, after a little training began to show its force and sweetness and flexibility in the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences.
She caught with great readiness the manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she inherited old social instincts which became nature with the briefest exercise. Not much license of dress was allowed in the educational establishment of Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to show her taste within the conventional limits prescribed. And Myrtle soon began to challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her dresses, and the skill with which she blended their colors.
"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous Planet Hotel, "she"s got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly splendid, when she"s got up in her swell clothes. That oriole"s wing she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she"ll be a stunning Pocahontas for the next tableau."
Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from, thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had pa.s.sed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, she might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning, and her extraordinary appet.i.te for every form of instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner or later.
There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet pa.s.sed.
"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe. "We keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."
Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.
Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of china at her own home,--old china, which had been a hundred years in the family, some of it.
"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne. "What queer-looking stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and bright! Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"
"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said, "some of them older than the china."
"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"
"One was a great beauty in her time."
"How jolly!"
"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary"s time."
"How very very wicked! It was n"t nice a bit, was it? Ain"t you telling me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you "ve got some new pictures and things, have n"t you? Who furnished your parlors?"
"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
"Stuff and nonsense. I don"t believe it. What color are your carriage-horses?"
"Our woman, Kitty f.a.gan, told somebody once we didn"t keep any horse but a cow."
"Not keep any horses! Do for pity"s sake let me look at your feet."
Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne.
Of that young lady"s ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of discoursing. Her "papaa" commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman, and her "mammaa" would once in a while forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a brown stone front, which veneers everybody"s antecedents with a facing of respectability.
Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and they were letting in very queer folks.
Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons were quite familiar.
There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.
"Oh, is n"t "Pickwick" nice?" she asked.
"I don"t know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."
The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. "Tasted any!
Why, I mean the "Pickwick Papers," d.i.c.kens"s story. Don"t you think they"re nice."
Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n"t know anything about them.
"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.
"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the great trunk and its contents. "I have read "Caleb Williams," and "Evelina," and "Tristram Shandy"" (naughty girl!), "and the "Castle of Otranto," and the "Mysteries of Udolpho," and the "Vicar of Wakefield,"
and "Don Quixote"--"
The young lady burst out laughing. "Stop! stop! for mercy"s sake," she cried. "You must be somebody that"s been dead and buried and come back to life again. Why you"re Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to powder your hair and wear patches."
"We"ve got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home. "She has n"t read any book that is n"t a thousand years old. One of the girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."
Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the young girl whose position in the school was a.s.sured from that moment.
She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions ill.u.s.trated by some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.
The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at the gathering.
"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By Jove, she"s the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a first-cla.s.s beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I were Florence Smythe, I"d try it, and begin now,--eh, Clara?"
Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston Jenkins"s repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with a change in the arrangement of the proper names. The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins"s remark about her friend to such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered by the leading "swell" of their circle as the most noticeable personage of the a.s.sembly. The individual exception in each case did very well as a matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.
It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet on her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth. It was as if it had just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked to her as it did that evening. It was the swan"s first breasting the water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,--to enchant with the commonest exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice which could not help being always gracious and winning, of a manner which came to her as an inheritance of which she had just found the t.i.tle. She read in the eyes of all that she was more than any other the centre of admiration. Blame her who may, the world was a very splendid vision as it opened before her eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs. How different the light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the dim chamber at The Poplars! Silence Withers was at that very moment looking at the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride. "The old picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking. But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it. A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her news from the Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so long indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux. The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or "gorgeous"
or "jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas, was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that the "Rescue of Captain John Smith" was specially got up to show her off.
Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian blood in her veins. It was one of those family legends which some of the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave uninvestigated. But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections which must have come from the old warriors and hunters and their dusky brides.
The Indians who visited the neighborhood recognized something of their own race in her dark eyes, as the reader may remember they told the persons who were searching after her. It had almost frightened her sometimes to find how like a wild creature she felt when alone in the woods. Her senses had much of that delicacy for which the red people are noted, and she often thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if she wished to track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were a Pequot or a Mohegan.
It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her for the part she was to take. Had she never worn that painted robe before?